


from the inside out

by M_Monoceros



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Cancer, Drabble, Ficlet, Gen, Lung Cancer, idk man it is what it is, implied major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-20 12:17:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18992512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Monoceros/pseuds/M_Monoceros
Summary: Elliot hears Mr. Robot cough and tastes blood in his mouth. The sound makes him feel like a kid again.





	from the inside out

**Author's Note:**

> this is a ficlet i wrote a long time ago, but never posted. found it in my drafts today and figured i'd share.

Elliot hears Mr. Robot cough and tastes blood in his mouth. The sound makes him feel like a kid again.

He tries to focus on the code in front of him but he can feel Mr. Robot’s eyes boring into the back of his head, and when Elliot looks at his hand it’s stained with a faint spray of crimson.

*

His mouth has tasted like iron for more than a month before a frazzled walk-in doctor looks down her glasses and tells him what he already knows—what Mr. Robot has known for a lot longer. 

Was it the cigarettes? All those years of drinking the tainted tap water that flowed from the plant? Or has his father’s pathology so thoroughly taken root in his being that Elliot’s madness has revived this part of him, too?

Mr. Robot doesn’t say anything about it, but Elliot can feel his panic. _He should be above this. He should be stronger than this._

That’s what he was created to be.

*

Dying’s not the problem. They don’t have to live for the plan to work—that was never the goal. In the back of his mind Elliot suspects Mr. Robot was probably planning to martyr himself somehow, anyways. Shit, he’d jump at the chance to die for the cause. But not this way; not yet. 

It’s too late to fight. Clean drinking water is hard enough to come by, never mind radiation or chemo, and he can’t exactly see Mr. Robot sitting patiently with an IV in his arm anyways.

So they keep working. Elliot doesn’t know when or why he agreed to bend to Mr. Robot’s will—he thinks there was something, some plan, some bigger game he had been playing, but whatever purpose he’d been clinging to has long since disintegrated, supplanted by the overwhelming fear of oblivion. 

Every night, Elliot wakes with his chest burning, gasping for air, choking on sputum that tastes like tar. He dreams he’s in health class again and his teacher is showing the class pictures of lungs crumbling, hardening into black ash. He imagines himself rotting from the inside out.

But it’s okay. Really. It makes things easier knowing he doesn’t have time to fight Mr. Robot. They’re getting worse by the day, but at least they’re united in this. 

The work is almost done, and they don’t have to live. They just have to live long enough.


End file.
